Week 3

This week had us dive into SolidWorks and Blender. With it being my first time ever seeing a 3D modeling software, I found myself amazed when I saw Alex extrude a plane. I began to see the wide range of possibilities that can be done and started to make connections with other areas such as video games. My excitement to learn, however, was met with a great deal of struggle as it has been pretty challenging to understand how to utilize these modeling tools due to my unfamiliarity with their operations and the interfaces. Most of all, I lack the intuition as of now to imagine how to transport sketches on paper or images in my head to a 3D environment. I’m reminded of my experience in one of my computer science classes. There, I was thrown into a lab project in logisim for the first time without having fully grasped the fundamentals in terms of navigating through the menus and understanding the function and purpose for each circuit component. After countless hours of exploring and experimenting with various features, I found myself with much more confidence when it comes to using logisim, and it is this experience that has encouraged me to go through many of the SolidWorks tutorials and just press everything in Blender. I’m sure with time utilizing these modeling softwares will become easier and make more sense. For now, we’ve been working on creating a mini environment in Blender. Everybody has been doing a great job so far from what I’ve been able to see. I’ve personally made a house with a roof and chimney, some rocks, a tree, and even a pig (at least I tried to).

Aside from these course sessions, my team and I have been working hard on creating ideas for how our 3D game might play. I’ve never thought much about game mechanics or the deliberate design choices one makes when introducing a player to a game for the first time. Because of that, I found it very insightful to hear the thoughts of Jorge, Hila, and Ezequiel when we played through some games for inspiration. We’ve initially delved around the idea of a rogue-like game in a fantasy world, and after meeting with professor Evrim, we’re now looking into creating a narrative with several branched paths. I’m starting to see how difficult game development and design research in general can be when starting out, but at least we have many people around us as support.

We’ve also had luncheon lectures with Jonathan Claussen and Jonathan Kelly. Claussen’s project on laser induced graphene and its various applications for precision agriculture was really interesting, and I found it informative hearing through Kelly’s project and how he decided to measure a user’s experience with different VR headsets based on their perception of distance. Overall, I had no clue what exactly many of the terms spoken meant or referred to, but I did manage to gain a good idea of what the projects were about, their goals, and how they sought to address a problem. Whenever it’s time for me to present a research project, I’ll definitely look back to these lectures as guidance (hmm could be pretty soon). Moreover, the conversations that occur after these presentations have been quite entertaining. For example, Kris started to go over what is and what is not a berry (I was kind of shocked to hear strawberries aren’t technically berries while bananas and cucumbers are). Nadya shared one of her favorite book series and how she misses the freedom to read as a child (the Percy Jackson series is also my most favorite book series and I do find it sad how growing up has made it more difficult for me to find time and just read a book for hours until end). The question about whether men cry also came up (I guess the influences of society and culture can be pretty strong but is it wrong to admit that I do especially during emotional movie scenes, I mean it’s only human to). There was even Tim’s debate on what classifies as a sandwich (no comment…just kidding it was enjoyable listening to everything at the far end of the room).